Philadelphia Film Festival
For the last few weeks, most of my energy has been involved in getting ready for the 2005 Philadelphia Film Festival. My company, TLA Entertainment Group, manages the festival for the Philadelphia Film Society.
This year we decided not to use the Theatre Manager box office software that we’ve been using the past few years. Although Theatre Manager is a nice program with many useful features, it runs on a fragile database architecture (we’ve lost data due to data corruption in the past), it doesn’t perform well on our slow WAN, and it uses a Modem-based credit card authorization system which causes many problems. It also suffers from over-complexity; it has so many features that it can be slow to complete a simple transaction. So my software development group set out to build a replacement in a two-month period. The challenge was increased by the fact that the Philadelphia Film Festival is a large event– last year over 61,000 tickets were sold.
My group mostly writes web (and intranet) applications. Although we occasionally write other kinds of code, this is where our greatest skill level is concentrated. Given the short development time, we didn’t want to learn a new platform or deal with unfamiliar bugs/issues.
For now, we’re busy maintaining the thing. No matter what the length of the development cycle is, every software project gets additional requirements once actual people start using it. With the film festival two and a half weeks away, we’re in the thick of that process now.
The good news is, the users seem to like the system a lot. My company is hoping to market this product to other organizations, and I think that has a good chance of success. It’s exciting!
